New York attorney general Letitia James’s long-running investigation into former President Donald Trump’s financial practices has expanded to include the process by which his real estate company won the lease on the historic Washington, DC building where his DC hotel is located.
According to The Washington Post, Ms James’s office has subpoenaed records from the General Services Administration – the government agency that manages federal real estate – pertaining to the process by which the GSA leased the historic Old Post Office building for renovation and redevelopment.
Mr Trump’s eponymous company, the Trump Organization, won a 2011 competition to redevelop the building by promising to spend roughly $200 million to convert it into a luxury hotel, which he said had “a chance to be one of the great hotels of the world” in an interview with NBC4 Washington at the time.
The GSA selection of Mr Trump was notable at the time because the federal government would typically not choose to do business with a person who had went through multiple bankruptcies when there were other, more solvent, bidders on the project.
Nearly a decade later, Mr Trump is trying to offload the lease to another hotel operator and the documents submitted by the Trump Organization during 2011-2012 bidding process are headed to Ms James’s office.
The attorney general is investigating whether Mr Trump or his company broke New York laws by inflating his alleged net worth for the purpose of obtaining loans and other benefits from financial institutions while reducing it for tax purposes.
In October, the House Oversight Committee issued a report detailing concerns over whether Mr Trump’s company had misled the GSA during the bidding process by concealing debts that would have made him a less attractive bidder in the government’s eyes.
New York Representative Carolyn Maloney and Virginia Representative Gerald Connolly also wrote to GSA administrator Robin Carnahan alleging that Mr Trump “concealed hundreds of millions of dollars in debts from GSA when bidding on the Old Post Office Building lease”and asked the agency to investigate.
